Backstage.bbc.co.uk blogtag:www.bbc.co.uk,2011:/blogs/bbcbackstage/4782011-02-01T11:20:31Zbackstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's early adopter network to encourage participation and support creativity through open innovation.Movable Type 4.33-enThanks for all the #tagstag:www.bbc.co.uk,2011:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2823462011-01-26T14:35:59Z2011-02-01T11:20:31Z So we're finally at the very end of a era. There's a few more things to sort out but generally its all come to an end. This blog will be mothballed for the future. I'd like to thank everyone...Ian Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.com

So we're finally at the very end of a era. There's a few more things to sort out but generally its all come to an end. This blog will be mothballed for the future.

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to get involved with Backstage.bbc.co.uk, be it to rave about what we were doing or shout at us about the DRM stance of the BBC. Without people like yourselves giving up your time to get involved, hack, tweak and scrape the BBC of its data, it wouldn't have been anywhere near the success it turned out to be. All this will go down in history as a breath taking project with many fingers in many pies which out performanced its very humble start and drove the way the BBC will move forward in the future.

Everyone I speak to since the announcement has asked in there own way, "so what next?" Well it would be a disrespectful to say something like backstage. There is almost nothing like the phenomenon which was BBC Backstage. As you might have heard many times, it was of its own time and to be frank it was put together by some of the smartest people in the UK net scene at the time.

R&D use to have a department called Imagineering which then became Creative R&D. That department was a magnet for talented people with wild imaginations and creative solutions. This is where Backstage came from along with projects for the creative archive, innovation labs, etc. Now Creative R&D is just R&D and the traditional research has been turned on its head forever more.

I've witness the backstage methodology just spread like wildfire. Every single day I hear some down right zainy ideas being talked about between engineers and researchers. Ideas that 5 years ago would have been shot down before they even get a chance to stretch their wings. The "Backstage approach" is common in the lanaguage between engineers, researchers, programme makers, etc. The legacy of Backstage is transfixed on the BBC and will never be forgotten.

In a economic environment like we are in now, making things happen will be all important. We won't stop taking risks, its what we do, but its important to be extremly cost effective with the ones we do.

"...Come on what's next?!" I hear you all shout...

Well we all have ideas about what areas could do with some creativity but its the combination of the ideas which will make up the replacement. I can tell you the core activity of watching and engaging with the hackers will prevail in some form. Data will be a large part of what happens next but maybe not at the level we were at before. Others have taken that fight onwards and its our time to look to the next 5 years.

Alan Kay once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." And you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to disagree with him. Rather that talk about what would replace Backstage, we will be inventing together with yourselves, the future. We can't wait...

So in Backstage fashion, thanks for all the tags... you were all truly inspiring and together we inspired.

Ian Forrester - Senior "Backstage" Producer

On behalf of everyone who collaborated and helped make backstage what it was over the last 5+ years - Thanks for all the tags!

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BBC Backstage the ebook retrospectivetag:www.bbc.co.uk,2011:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2807332011-01-05T13:43:06Z2011-01-05T16:46:29ZIts been an amazing five years but finally the servers are powering down on the backstage.bbc.co.uk (to be official) project.The legacy of backstage will live on, but what better way to end the project but to launch a ebook which...Ian Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.com
Its been an amazing five years but finally the servers are powering down on the backstage.bbc.co.uk (to be official) project.The legacy of backstage will live on, but what better way to end the project but to launch a ebook which tells some of the stories of how the project started way back in 2004.

We commisioned Suw Charman-Anderson to create the eBook retrospective of the whole project, quite a challenge as you can imagine. But she's done a excellent job with help from editor Jim McClennan and designer Nicola Rowlands. Its an fantastic piece of work I think you will agree.It also serves as a very fitting tribute to the endless efforts of the many staff, friends, hackers, developers, designers, critics, etc, etc of the project over the last half decade.

There is plenty of background information in the ebook including those playground servers, the amazing array of prototypes and some real interesting points about the nature hacking... maybe someone should update wikipedia with some of the information?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm really happy to present the Backstage Ebook:Hacking the BBC, a backstage retrospective. From us to you, for making backstage what it became.

(The Amazon Kindle will read MOBI files, the Apple iPad makes great work of the PDF, while most others readers will accept epub. If you're in any doubt try the PDF on which is full colour or the RTF which is just the content.)

I think its safe to say the ebook is licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. So please do share it and tells us what bits you loved or hated. In actual fact, tells us what bits you loved or hated generally about the whole project. We really value your feedback and of course everything you all did to make backstage your place to influence the BBC as a whole.

thank's for all the tags

.... end line :)

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Backstage: The Beginningtag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2748302010-11-09T18:00:00Z2010-11-09T19:07:46ZBrendan Crowtherhttp:///www.bbc.co.uk
For those who don’t know me, I’m a researcher for BBC Research & Development. For the last fifteen months I’ve been on attachment with BBC Scotland learning about how R&D interfaces with production divisions. Prior to my attachment I worked closely with Ian on Backstage events such as the Edinburgh Un-Festival and Over the Air so now I’m back in the fold I’ve been asked to work with a small team on the closedown and migration of BBC Backstage.

A few weeks have passed since the announcement that Backstage is due to close. It’s taken a while to get up to speed but recently we’ve really started to get a clear idea on what we need to do to close down Backstage in a way that preserves its legacy and continues to support its community. Here’s a brief rundown of what we’ve been up to.

At the moment we’re working our way through the current website to working out which projects are still live. All APIs and feeds will remain available until we establish what will replace the website at which point we’ll migrate everything to its new home. We’re also looking at how to archive the content no longer in use as a resource for the future.

We’re in discussion with a couple of organisations about the new home for the Backstage developer community. What we want to do is plug the current community into the wider groups at large in the UK looking at open and linked data. Allied to this is a piece of work looking at how we continue to evangelise the provision of open data internally at the BBC.

To help commemorate Backstage we’ll be producing a retrospective ebook at the end of the year. Created in collaboration with Suw Charman-Anderson and Kevin Anderson it will draw on the whole of Backstage’s five year run, telling the stories of the people, projects and institutions involved in a project that crossed lines and pushed boundaries. We’ll be running a number of extracts from over the coming months. In this first one Kevin tells the story of Backstage’s birth:

“The whole idea was to do it quite slowly and quietly, don’t have a big fanfare, do it under the radar.” James Boardwell.

Out of the ashes of the dotcom crash rose a new, more open web. Instead of simply offering linked pages, sites began offering APIs - application programming interfaces that allowed developers to build additional functionality on top of existing sites.

Google launched its first APIs in April 2002, allowing developers to query its index of more than 2bn web documents. Amazon launched its Web Services three months later. Both companies gave developers a way to build applications with their content and integrate those applications easily with their sites.

The shift from static web pages to APIs and applications was not lost on Matt Locke, at the time the BBC’s head of innovation. Just after the turn of the century Locke was part of a team working on a report looking at the predicted state of broadband in the UK in 2014. The report found that,

“the BBC, which is very focused on control and broadcasting and one-to-many communications, was unlikely to be able to adapt enough to get the full affordance of network connections, social media and so on.”

Locke believed that the BBC should enable open innovation by working with lead users of new technologies to spur development. Tom Loosemore, at the time with BBC Future Media & Technology, was working with developers both inside and outside the BBC. Locke and Loosemore met at Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service, and over pizza sketched out a model for innovation to engage with lead users. This model was to become Backstage.

Backstage was all about enabling the BBC to engage with the external developer community. Image courtesy of Rain Ashford.

The community would be open but self-selecting, attracting people possessing not only unique skills but also a focused passion for digital technology and the future of media. Locke asked a member of his innovation team, James Boardwell, to manage the project.

The first step was to see what feeds already existed at the BBC.

“A lot of data was available without anyone actually knowing it, especially around news,” Boardwell said. Many BBC sites already were producing RSS feeds but while people were aware of them, the knowledge and understanding of them was limited.

Due to the abundance of feeds from News, Loosemore went to them to find a developer for the project. Ben Metcalfe had already been doing similar work. Previously he had given a presentation to BBC News Website management about what a ‘BBC News API’ might look like. Nothing came of the meeting but he continued to build small prototypes in his spare time. One of these prototypes caught Loosemore’s eye and he asked Metcalfe to join the Backstage project.

“Use our stuff to make your stuff.” A project using Arduino kit and weather feeds to create ambient info-lighting? We can do that. Image courtesy of Rain Ashford.

In its early days the project had a informality and a daringness to it that was quite uncommon in the BBC. Instead of going to management and asking for permission for the data, Metcalfe would speak directly to other BBC developers and ask them to expose a feed. Often it was possible but just wasn’t being done.

News was their first early win, with Metcalfe working with many of his former colleagues.

“That was what we launched with. The whole idea was to do it quite slowly and quietly, don’t have a big fanfare, do it under the radar,” Boardwell said.

Metcalfe remembers Backstage then having the atmosphere of a start-up.

“In the early days it was just James Boardwell and myself working full time on the project. We both did anything that needed to be done – from working with ops guys to set the server up through to liaising with the legal department on the creation of the license Backstage made the data available under.”

Much of Boardwell’s early work was with legal teams to come up with a licence acceptable to both the BBC and the external developers they hoped to engage.

With knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff on board, a licence in place and sources for the data feeds acquired, Backstage was ready for launch.

We’ll be posting more extracts from Suw and Kevin over the next month. In the meantime please feel free to share your memories of Backstage with us and let us know your thoughts on our plans for the future.

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BBC Backstage to closetag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2678552010-10-21T15:40:23Z2010-10-22T11:27:11Z As has been discussed recently in the press and various channels online, the BBC has taken the decision to close BBC Backstage in December 2010. Given the report recently in the Guardian Tech blog this no doubt comes as...Adrian Woolard

As has been discussed recently in the press and various channels online, the BBC has taken the decision to closeBBC Backstage in December 2010. Given the report recently in the Guardian Tech blog this no doubt comes as little surprise to most. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain why this decision was made and what it means for the BBC as an open innovator in the future.

BBC Backstage has been a great success. I am very proud to have worked with the team on numerous projects. It was the forerunner to many other emerging, successful initiatives and has made a valuable contribution in driving the BBC towards genuine open innovation. In many ways it has been very much of its time.

Hackday 2007. The Banana Labs team gather around a darkened desk to mash up yet another prototype using BBC data.

Following the official launch of Backstage in 2005 the project has consistently delivered groundbreaking prototypes using BBC data. Personally, the stories of Hackday 2007 at Ally Pally where lightning did indeed strike twice remains one of the numerous high points. On that remarkable day the creative energies of the developer community prevailed, sheltering under umbrellas at times, with many people working through the night to build outstanding prototypes over the course of the weekend. Lord Reith would have approved of Backstage and its community on that day and many others.

Looking forward, BBC Future Media will shortly launch a more comprehensive repository of data feeds, development tools and APIs which will supersede the current Backstage collection. The BBC is in early discussions with a number of the other UK developer communities about aspirations to create a larger network of independent developers that will absorb and support the current BBC Backstage community.

As many of you know Ian Forrester, the producer of Backstage, fell seriously ill in May of this year. The plan for last ten months was always to implement a systematic winding down of Backstage in early summer but Ian’s illness precluded this. Now that Ian is once again able to take up his role within BBC R&D it feels like the right time to retire Backstage and allow Ian to concentrate on new projects. Innovation and Innovators don’t stand still and with the Backstage model now firmly established elsewhere it’s time to move on.

Over the remaining months, we will be using the Backstage blog to celebrate the achievements of the project. We’ll be sharing some articles written by Suw Charman-Anderson, commissioned earlier this year to produce a retrospective piece on the initiative. We will discuss in more detail the aspirations around the growth of a richer developer community in UK and Europe, explore the legacy of the project and its place in UK developer history and also share some details on some of the newer projects that the team have been working on.

Mashed 2008. Jemima Kiss of the Guardian interviews, and Flip films, Ewan Spence on his Social Flight Simulator.

Huge credit and recognition needs to go out to so many people involved since the germ of the idea that became BBC Backstage was conceived in 2004. In particular I’d like to give thanks to the following people for their efforts: James Boardwell, Ben Metcalfe, Matt Locke, Tom Loosemore, Jem Stone, Ian Forrester, Matthew Cashmore, Rain Ashford and Ant Miller.

Finally, and most importantly, the BBC recognises that the success of Backstage is down to the whole community of developers, designers, contributors (and even critics) built around the project - a community who pushed it far beyond its original concept.

The BBC wants to support the community that is BBC Backstage and we’d really welcome ideas on how to extract as much learning from the project as possible as well as your thoughts on what its spiritual successor should tackle next. I want to say personally that BBC R&D is committed to retaining the team who have worked tirelessly on Backstage and I am looking forward to working with them on applying the Backstage philosophy to the new challenges faced by BBC.

Cheers and hope to see you in the next incarnation.

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Pulling related web content into a live TV streamtag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2466372010-08-24T15:16:03Z2010-08-24T16:13:58Z Like everyone else, we have been wondering what set top boxes connected to the internet will look like for the user. What kind of interfaces will work best when TV and the web become bedfellows? We decided to mock...Andrew Littledalehttp://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data_art/
Like everyone else, we have been wondering what set top boxes connected to the internet will look like for the user. What kind of interfaces will work best when TV and the web become bedfellows?

We decided to mock up a prototype application to play around with some user interface ideas.

The most useful application we could think of was something that would provide web content that was relevant to what was being talked about on TV.

So we created a Flash application that pulls in live subtitles from an IRC channel and places them underneath a live feed of News 24. Thanks very much to Andrew McParland and his team in R&D for making the subtitles available.

As the subtitles appear on the screen they are sent off to a natural language processing API and relevant concepts are extracted from the text (and in our case returned as DBpedia terms).

When the concepts come back from the API they are placed over the EMP on the left of the picture. We've mapped these terms to BBC News content and clicking on them reveals links on the right. Clicking on these opens up the web page in a new tab.

It needs a bit of work. Sometimes the concepts returned are a little random and it would be good to filter them. We also need to come up with a scalable way of using the subtitles. Both things are doable.

It would also be possible to tailor the application to link to specific parts of bbc.co.uk. At the moment we are just linking to News but it could be that we linked to GCSE Bitesize so that students could find Learning content that was relevant to stuff they were watching on TV.

With Google TV launching in the Autumn and Canvas next year expect to see more interfaces like this soon.

Screencast

This video shows the application working with a live stream from News 24

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

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Thinking Digitaltag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2245982010-06-21T12:01:23Z2010-06-21T14:54:40Z Thinking Digital 2010 was a blast... It was an excellent two days of insightful, informative, eclectic and mind-bending talks around digital or technology related subjects. It's one of the few conferences that I attend knowing I will do my...Thinking Digital 2010 was a blast... It was an excellent two days of insightful, informative, eclectic and mind-bending talks around digital or technology related subjects. It's one of the few conferences that I attend knowing I will do my best to attend most of the talks - as the quality of speakers is fantastic!

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Joi Ito, ,
advised us not to follow trends but to "question authority and think
for yourself". How giving stuff away for free is incredible, how most
of the internet is run by amateurs who are not paid "open source lowers
the cost of failure and drives innovation". Documentally,
took us on an entertaining trip via stories of his exploits in Iraq and
Parkistan, how his kit has changed over the years, but says that all
you really need these days is a smart phone, plus he mentioned the
importance of backing up data "My data is backed up in 3 places, data
just vanishes, especially when crossing borders!" Jon Drori,
gave two brilliant talks. Firstly, a run down on 23 of the classic
pitfalls of business relationships, including nuggets: "avoid
understanding your audience or what they want and how they work" and
"never confuse a neat idea with a strategy". Followed on day two by a
sum-up of compelling experiences - they were surmised as: Defined,
Fresh, Accessible, Immersive, they are Significant and are
Transformative.

Andy Hobsbawm, of DoTheGreenThing,
talked about the challenges his company faced in reframing
sustainability and driving behavior to make recycling desirable. Also,
initiatives such as Walkcast to aid the enjoyment of walking and Glove
Love - a lost glove = a double throw away!
Tom Wujec,
told us about the 'marshmallow challenge' - a team building exercise
where the aim is to build a structure with items such as spaghetti and
string, then balance a marshmallow on the top. He described various
personalities and their approaches to this, including that recent
business school graduates do worst and the people who do best are
kindergarten kids as they achieve the exercise via play and enjoy it -
"they don't seek power to achieve the goal". Tom finished with the
warning that "every project has it's own marshmallow - the assumption
is that a marshmallow is light and fluffy, but it's not - don't
overlook it!" Luis Von Ahn, after introducing himself by asking "You know Captcha?
Do you hate it? Well, I invented that..." Roughly 200 million Captchas
that take roughly 10 seconds are typed every day, so Luis wanted to
find a way to use all this human effort for good. He came up with Re-Capture,
a way of using the system to get people to read words from old books
that computers can't recognize from OCR. Roughly 80 million words
solved a day, equals about 4 million books translated per year!
Robert Lang,
we were taken on a charming journey centered on origami, via history,
maths and computer aided design. We heard about how paper-folding
patterns can help with problem solving for scientists and engineers
looking for clever ways to get around size and logistical problems. For
example, the umbrella pattern has been used for a 5 metre collapsible
space telescope, plus solar sails, in other uses: airbags for cars and
medical stents that fold up small enough to go through an artery and
then unfold.
Jer Thorpe,
gave an interesting talk on data visualization and Processing with some
lovely imagery. When he first started playing with Arduino he wasn't
sure what to do with it, so talked to his 10 year-old self and decided
to create an alarm for when aliens landed with added wireless
functionality!
David Siegel,
discussed the importance of the semantic web and searching for data
such as the difference in results you'll get between Google and Wolfram
Alpha. He touched on rethinking your relationship to information and
how we will soon be at 5 billion connected devices which will be
capable of pumping out our information automatically, growing
exponentially. David predicts that in the future we will move from
"push to pull" and have 'data lockers' to store our information in
various levels depending on relationship, e.g. family, purchasing,
work, etc - it was hotly debated who might be the trusted keepers of
these!

Richard Titus, Friction: Good, evil, necessity or fuel?,
a talk about 'friction' - "Friction is the evil of all motion" a quote
from Fear of Physics and went on to give us various examples and
lessons: 'Privacy is NOT secrecy': 'Secrecy is almost non-existent
today'. Richard also gave probably the most re-tweeted quote of the day
"Data is the new Oil" which has already appeared on a badge!
Tom Scott, weaved a cautionary tale about social networking and flashmobs out of control, plus also showed us his Evil app that reveals easily obtainable phone numbers from unsuspecting people on Facebook.
Ken Banks, FrontlineSMS
enables communication in third world Africa, in areas that don't have
internet connectivity. An example is software for laptops and mobiles,
which allows simple text and image communication for non-profit
organizations, doctors and human rights campaigners in dangerous
situations. Another system used a mobile phone for blood smear
diagnosis.
Big thanks to Herb Kim & the Codeworks team for a great 3 days at Thinking Digital 2010 - looking forward to next year's conference already.
Lastly and not least, we all missed Ian Forrester very much at TDC and we sent him positive vibes en masse - get well soon, Ian!

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Ian Forrestertag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2167692010-05-19T11:50:00Z2010-06-04T12:34:42ZHi This is just to let you know that unfortunately Ian Forrester, Senior Development Producer of BBC Backstage was taken ill last week and is now recuperating in Hope Hospital in Salford. At the moment he is in a serious...Ant MillerThis is just to let you know that unfortunately Ian Forrester, Senior Development Producer of BBC Backstage was taken ill last week and is now recuperating in Hope Hospital in Salford.

At the moment he is in a serious but stable condition and is being well cared for by the staff at Hope and his family.

For those who want to pass on their messages the Message for Ian Google form is here.

[Edit 04/06/10] Now that Ian's family have set up the Caring Bridge site we're recommending that people wanting to drop him a line use that channel instead.

Based on the developer network BBC Backstage, the learning project titled "DataArt" [bbc.co.uk] aims to introduce people to the power of information visualisation as a contemporary media form of increasing importance (somehow sounds familiar?). The project will publish a series of data visualizations, focused principally on BBC data sources but potentially cross-referenced with other publicly available data. In practice, this means the BBC will provide tools, tutorials, example computer code one can download and modify, and access to copyright free data sources.

BBC Learning recognises that the interpretation of open data is an increasingly important skill for us all and expects the site will appeal to audiences interested in data visualization in general, digital art and design, those interested in the BBC and those looking at data visualization from an educational perspective.

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When is a dataset not a dataset? The hackday project that crowdsourced data.gov.uktag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.1930962010-04-22T11:31:45Z2010-04-22T17:10:10Z When is a dataset not a dataset? How many of the now 3241 datasets listed as part of data.gov.uk are easy to open up and play with? How many are tables for computers to analyse, instead of PDF reports...Dr Ian McDonald

When is a dataset not a dataset? How many of the now 3241 datasets listed as part of data.gov.uk are easy to open up and play with? How many are tables for computers to analyse, instead of PDF reports for people to read?

The Hacks and Hackers Hackday filled a Channel 4 office with journalists and developers on the final Friday in January. Our aim was to tell new stories with open data. Attendees already had form - the BBC's Open Secrets blogger Martin Rosenbaum, and data journalism teams from the Times, the Guardian, and the FT. Tom Loosemore judged our attempts in his role as head of hosts 4iP, alongside My Society boss Tom Steinberg. They awarded the prize to my team's analysis of Tory candidates. But another project promised to shed light on public data in the UK.

Tom Morris was part of a team that looked into the quality of data.gov.uk. Although data.gov.uk advertises itself as a database of open datasets, many of the entries are actually PDF files. He built a prototype format checker that invites people to go through datasets and record the file format. You can listen to him explaining the checker to me and to the hackday, or reuse the interview under the BBC Backstage License.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

On Wednesday February 3rd, he put a completed quality checker online. On that Thursday, the crowd had gone through data.gov.uk and marked up all of the datasets.

Tom posted his initial breakdown to the data.gov.uk community on March 20th:

HTML -

252

XML -

5

Word -

4

RTF -

1

OpenOffice -

1

Something odd -

85

JSON -

9

Nothing there! -

190

CSV -

12

Multiple formats -

1211

PDF -

468

RDF -

10

Excel -

408

TOTAL -

2656

Sadly, this is over-optimistic. I've manually checked some of the data
that has been categorised as JSON and RDF. Most of it is not actually
correctly categorised - either people clicked, say, 'RDF' when they
meant to click 'PDF', or they have seen an RSS or Atom feed and
categorised it as RDF.
What this admittedly imperfect dataset is basically saying is that the
vast majority of the 'data' on data.gov.uk is not actually
machine-readable data but human-readable documents.

He will be at the Open Knowledge Conference this weekend, where he will speak about Citizendium and might do the analysis, which he told me was the most important part. When done, it will be very interesting indeed to read it.

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BBC Backstage: five year retrospectivetag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2078362010-04-15T20:45:23Z2010-04-15T21:25:39ZBackstage, is approaching five years old believe it or not. So to celebrate I have asked Social technologist Suw Charman-Anderson of the popular Strange Attractor blog to put together a retrospective. Don't worry there will be data and mashups but...Ian Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.com
Backstage, is approaching
five years old believe it or not. So to celebrate I have asked Social technologist Suw Charman-Anderson of the popular Strange Attractor blog to put
together a retrospective. Don't worry there will be data and mashups but we also want you all to
share with us your stories and memories of the last five years

So the first project is image-based: We are looking for your favourite photos
and images of Backstage and the stories behind them. The images might
be a photo from a Backstage event that you really enjoyed, or a
screenshot of a prototype you developed or a visualisation of BBC data
that you put together. We don't mind what type of image it is, just so
long as it's online and you can tell us a bit about it.

The second project is map-based: We'd like you to tell us what your
favourite experiences of Backstage were. Perhaps a prototype you put
together, an event you went to, or something else completely. We'd also
like to know where you are based (at whatever level of detail you feel
comfortable) so that we can see how far Backstage reached. When Backstage first launched it was mainly for the UK only but the internationalisation of Backstage was overwelming, so it would be great to see how far we're really talking.

Both mash-ups are based on Google Docs so the two forms are embedded
in the page after the last link, or you can go straight to the pages directly by following...
Mapping Your BBC Backstage Memories or Images of BBC Backstage. In both cases, if you add info to the spreadsheets we take that
to mean that you're happy for us to reuse your contribution.

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Prototype: BBC + Data.gov.uk mashuptag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2059202010-04-07T16:41:17Z2010-04-07T16:54:44Z Our friends at Rewired State, recently had a hackday where Ben Griffins created a Greasemonkey script which, Publishes links to relevant data.gov.uk datasets next to news articles on the BBC website. Provides important context for those articles and increased...Ian Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.com

Publishes links to relevant data.gov.uk datasets next to news articles on the BBC website. Provides important context for those articles and increased visibility for the datasets. Implemented as a simple greasemonkey Firefox script connecting to a simple search service built with Google's ajax search api.

Not content with that Ben's already thinking about packaged it as a firefox toolbar rather than a greasemonkey plug-in. Moving away from reliant on google's search apis.
and of course, if it supported more websites. There's also a potential to add crowd-sourced citations too.]]>
Prototype: BBC Archivertag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2059172010-04-07T16:20:59Z2010-04-07T16:37:04ZIan Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.com

There is something amazing about looking at stacks of data over a period of time, and BBC Archiver does exactly that. Some of you might even remember something like it called the BBC home page archive but James Holden's latest project snapshots the whole page and allows you to view the changes in animated way.

The project is running on a C#
app I wrote to correctly screen capture the page (harder than you'd of thought)
and then using a local webserver it FTP's (via PHP) the resulting 3 images
(thumb, medium and large) to the live server. The comparison tool (a link at
the bottom of each image which is easily missed at the moment) is written and
runs on the live server to compare the visual changes, written in PHP/GD.
Obviously I haven't spent any time on the front-end site so that would be the
next logical step.

In my head I'd see this as being
the ultimate tool for archive.org. If you go "way back" using their tool you
can see that resources are missing and indeed as the browser changes rapidly the
result you see in newer browsers doesn't represent the look and feel the user
got at the time which is an important point if you trying to look back at the
way it was. Loading Netscape.com in Mosaic back in the mid 90's would have been
an altogether different experience than in today's "Chrome's and
Firefox's"

Fantastic prototype, which we hope he can keep running for a long time to come.]]>
Data Visualisation Weekend postponed to Junetag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2041952010-03-30T15:12:14Z2010-03-30T18:24:54ZIan Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.comUnfortunately due to
high chance of purdah being upon us any time now, it is ver likely
the event will fall during purdah.
This being the case, data.gov.uk would not be able to have any input
such as speaking, or promoting the great work done on the weekend by
those concerned.

Considering this, we have made the decision to
push the event back to June - so we can all get together in the summer
and make some superb visuals.

In the meantime, sign up is still
open, and we hope to announce some very exciting guest speakers very
soon.

Thanks for your interest, and get registering to come
if you haven't yet! :) ]]>
API's and an Ontology for Wildlifetag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2027642010-03-24T14:38:50Z2010-03-24T15:24:03Z Apis And APIs a wildlife ontologyPresentation by Tom Scott.There's no doubt that our commitment to Semantic Web technologies is very strong. The work that has been done around /programmes, /music and recently /topics is certainly of interest to those...Ian Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.comApis And APIs a wildlife ontology

There's no doubt that our commitment to Semantic Web technologies is very strong. The work that has been done around /programmes, /music and recently /topics is certainly of interest to those who would like to explorer and remix data under the backstage licence. But its also a way forward for owners of huge data resources and not sure how to best release there stuff.

The Wildlife Ontology was originally designed to support the publishing
of data from the BBC Wildlife Finder application. This application
provides access to a rich set of information and data about biological
species, as well as pointers to BBC broadcast output that relate to
these topics. The ontology should therefore complement the existing Programmes Ontology for
describing TV programmes.

Whilst it originates in a specific BBC use case, the Wildlife Ontology
should be applicable to a wide range of biological data publishing use
cases. Care has been taken to try and ensure interoperability with more
specialised ontologies used in scientific domains such as taxonomy,
ecology, environmental science, and bioinformatics

If you visit the wildlifefinder site you will be forgiven for asking where's the API, wheres the data? Simply find what you want and pop .rdf on the end and you got everything and more in a structured data format which you can remix and mashup to your pleasure.

I'm very excited by this data and the whole way its been done, you could imagine something like the Solar System having the same treatment in the future. Full credit to Tom Scott's team and Tails There's tons more information in Tom's presentation above.]]>
Maker Faire 2010tag:www.bbc.co.uk,2010:/blogs/bbcbackstage//478.2015312010-03-16T21:25:25Z2010-03-18T23:27:11ZIan Forresterhttp://www.cubicgarden.com

BBC Backstage was back at Maker Faire 2010 with BBC R&D to showcase a few of the experiments we've been working on.

There's lots more coverage on the R&D Blog of each prototype but there's also a lovely video which you can watch which covers most of the weekend in Newcastle.

Thanks to everyone who helped pull the whole thing together and made it a great weekend. I expect by now, you may have seen we were giving away special edition coloured backstage tshirts to people who came to the stand. Look out there will be more chances to grab yourself a special edition tshirt.